Author: Leah Cypess

Completely without expression, he dipped a hand into the pouch at his belt and placed something small and square in her palm.

Ileni blinked, surprised at his compliance. Was she bullying him just as his classmates did? But then she recognized the dark object in her hand, and her mouth watered.

Compunctions gone, she popped it into her mouth and closed her eyes as she swallowed. The taste of chocolate lingered on her tongue.

“Where did you get this?” she breathed.

Bazel’s face closed. He stared past her stolidly, like a defeated animal waiting to be hit.

Sorin gripped her elbow from behind. Ileni looked up to see the sneer he aimed at Bazel. “Are you going to invite our teacher to dance?”

Bazel didn’t reply.

“Are you?” Ileni asked Sorin, to get his attention away from Bazel. It worked. He looked down at her, then pulled her away from the corner. Ileni glanced over her shoulder just long enough to see another assassin approach Bazel, and Bazel’s gaze lift from the floor as his hand dipped into his pouch.

Obviously, the chocolate was a secret—even if an open one. Another of those small freedoms? Or maybe this was something the master actually didn’t know about. Though even as she thought it, she didn’t really believe it.

She turned back to Sorin. “Can’t you see he’s afraid of you? Why—”

Sorin swung her around in a dizzying swirl, and her harangue ended in a tiny shriek. When he pulled her back to him, his eyes still hard, she opened her mouth and then shut it. She didn’t want to fight. Besides, what would it change? Should it surprise her that he was capable of cruelty?

What she said instead was, “Where does Bazel get the chocolate?”

Sorin shrugged, his mouth twisting. “Others gather it on their missions, I assume, and he arranges trades for them. It’s one way to make himself useful.”

That was possible . . . but it didn’t entirely make sense. I’ll be getting more soon, Bazel had said. How could he possibly know if one of his fellow assassins was going to be coming back alive?

Through her dizziness, Ileni tried to remember if Sorin had been close enough to hear. It wasn’t like him to miss things. . . .

But of course, this was just a small freedom, and it was just Bazel. Not worth Sorin’s concern. If he didn’t pay attention, then he didn’t have to worry about how Bazel got the chocolates, and whether it involved more than a small freedom. Didn’t have to think about whether it was something that should be stopped.

How convenient for him.

When Sorin offered her another goblet of wine, Ileni took it and drained it with barely a sputter. She liked his surprised grin, and the way the wine sizzled through her blood, and the fuzziness of her mind. Her worries and regrets and fears seemed dulled and distant, and she laughed again, because it was so easy and it felt so good. She leaned back, laughing, trusting Sorin’s arms to support her. She wanted to feel like this forever.

“How often do you do this?” she asked Sorin when they stopped to rest. They sat side by side against the wall, him in a crouch that was simultaneously relaxed and ready, her with her skirt spread over her outstretched legs. Sorin wasn’t touching her, but she could feel him, inches from her skin.

“Like it, do you?” Sorin tilted his head down at her. His arms rested loosely on his knees. “There will be more, though not very often. We celebrate every time one of us returns alive from a successful mission.”

A successful mission.

All at once, everything came rushing back: where she was and who she was dancing with, her past and her present and her narrow bleak future. And what she was celebrating, what all this joy was about. The death of someone, far away in the Empire, a dagger stained with blood. The knowledge rose around her, threatening to overwhelm her, to engulf her again in a black fog of misery.

No. She focused on the present, on the music and laughter, on Sorin’s face as he watched her. She reached out recklessly and closed her hand around his.

“I want to dance again,” she said.

Sorin’s fingers pressed, very slightly, against hers. “Already? Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she said, and scrambled to her feet. He stood up too, looking bemused, and followed her back out onto the training floor.

Chapter 11

The next morning, Ileni woke with a throbbing headache she suspected was a hangover. She’d heard some of the Renegai commonfolk talking about hangovers once. Until now, she had assumed they were exaggerating.

“It’s not a hangover,” Sorin said unsympathetically when he arrived to pick her up. “You’re just tired. You didn’t drink enough to have a hangover.”

But she had drunk enough, she suspected, to make a complete fool of herself. Her face burned as she leaned weakly against the wall. Another good reason not to leave this room ever again.

Except, of course, that she had no choice. Small freedoms. No matter the illusion created last night, her life here was not her own, and she had better not forget it if she wanted to stay alive.

In the dining hall, Sorin sat across from her, leaving an empty seat at his table—no, not just one. Ravil’s seat was also still empty. “Was it Ravil who came back? From his . . . from his mission?”

“No. It was someone else.”

“Where is that person?”

Sorin jabbed his spoon into his porridge, which he had retrieved from his own table before coming over. “With the master, reporting on what he learned. And what he will not realize he learned, until the master points it out.”

His voice was terse. Ileni put her own spoon down. “You’re jealous.”

He stirred his porridge, then spooned some into his mouth.

She remembered how he had held her last night, controlled and wild. But most of all, joyous. She remembered her questions the first night, about how all these young men could be forced to kill. How incredibly stupid she had been. “You want to be sent.”

“Of course I do.”

Ileni picked up her spoon, slowly. “To kill someone you don’t even know.”

“Easier than if I did know him.”

She swallowed a mouthful of porridge. It went down in a hard lump.

“That wasn’t a joke. The noble I killed was a quick job—into his room and out in less than an hour. If you have to befriend someone before you kill him . . . those are the most difficult missions, the ones the master assigns only to his most trusted students.”

Ileni looked down at the rest of her porridge, mostly so she could look away from him, from the longing clear on his face. She had to stop forgetting what he was.

Even though she was hungry, the sweet, thick smell from her bowl made her stomach turn over. She forced in a few more spoonfuls, then put her spoon down and endured until the meal was over, closing her eyes periodically.

It didn’t improve her mood to find that her students—most of whom had been dancing all night, and had drunk far more than she had—were as attentive and disciplined as ever. Her attempt to get through class without expending any power seemed even more pathetically obvious than usual, and she braced herself for a challenge from Irun. But he said not a word. He just watched her grimly, his silence more menacing than an outright confrontation.

By the time she was finished with her first lesson, her mind had begun to work again. As her students rose to their feet, she said, “Sorin. A word.”

The two boys next to Sorin exchanged glances, which reminded her that they had seen her display of . . . whatever that had been . . . last night. Her cheeks heated up. By the time Sorin obediently came to stand in front of her, they felt beet red.

He waited patiently, as if he didn’t notice. She cleared her throat. “Did Absalm and Cadrel go to the celebrations?”

Sorin blinked, then rubbed the side of his neck. “Absalm did, yes. I don’t think we had any celebrations while Cadrel was here.”

“For two whole months?”

“It’s not unusual. Our missions depend on events in the Empire, on who wants to hire us, and on the master’s plans. Sometimes nobody gets sent for years.”

“How boring for you all.”

“It makes for better training.” He glanced over his shoulder at the now-empty cavern. “But since Irun’s success, our missions will probably be far more frequent.”

“Who invited Absalm to the celebrations?”

“I did.” Sorin shifted his weight slightly. “Why does it matter whether he went? Nobody killed him for that.”

“I don’t know,” Ileni said. “But there must have been something they did that led to their being killed. I won’t know what it is until I find it.”

Sorin considered her. “Ileni—”

But then the next group of students began filing into the cavern, and he stopped talking and turned away.

Ileni wondered what he had been going to say for most of the second class. By the third class, she had turned to the more productive question of what other small rules her predecessors might have broken. She had seen only one other illicit activity last night, and while she couldn’t imagine someone being killed over chocolate, either, it was the only avenue she had to explore.

She waited until she and Sorin were at the entrance to the dining cavern, with Bazel only a few yards behind them. Then she turned and said, “Bazel. Sit with me, please. I want to talk to you.”

Bazel blinked at her, then darted a nervous glance at Sorin, whose expression was flinty. Ileni turned her back on both of them and made her way to her table. As she sat, Bazel headed toward her, exuding reluctance. Sorin started as if to follow, then turned on his heel and stalked to his own table.

The midday meal was some sort of clawed, buglike creature that had been served once before—a delicacy in the Empire, Sorin had informed her then, and therefore something the assassins had to learn to eat with pleasure. Ileni looked at the red legs and antennae splayed out on her plate and decided she didn’t have to learn any such thing. She folded her hands together on the table and looked at Bazel, who was methodically taking apart his own food, keeping his eyes on the scaly red limbs. When she said his name, he looked up, stony resentment in his pale blue eyes.

She resisted the urge to apologize. Instead she said, “I want to offer you a trade.”

He chewed and swallowed before he replied. “Thank you, Teacher. But I don’t think you have anything I want.”

“Then you lack imagination. Wouldn’t you like to know how you can beat Irun next time he decides to attack you?”

Silence. Bazel looked down at his plate, rigid and unmoving. When he spoke, it was in a near whisper. “Irun has a lot of magical power, too.”

“He does. But power without knowledge isn’t very useful. With the spells I would teach you, you could humiliate him.”

Bazel’s hands twitched. “In your class,” he said finally. “I would pay for it later, in our next weapons drill. Pay heavily, I would imagine.”

A fatal accident, Sorin had said. Ileni repressed a shiver. “Possibly,” she said. “Of course, that wouldn’t change the fact that Irun had been humiliated.”

Bazel smiled. It wasn’t a smile she wanted to return. It was grim, deadly, and so implacable that she suddenly wondered if this was a good idea.

Too late to reconsider. “Of course, I would have to tutor you privately. It would take a lot of my time.”

“You have something better to do?” Bazel said.

Just because someone was being victimized did not, necessarily, make him likeable. Ileni lifted her chin, trying to look mysterious rather than irritated. “A great number of things.”

“Like allowing Sorin to drag you along as the special entertainment for one of his parties?”

Was that why he had brought her? “What do you mean, his parties? You were there, too.”